RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/26/defense-of-ali-watkins-exposes

In an attempt to defend its hiring of Ali Watkins, the young reporter caught having an affair with a now-indicted Senate staffer responsible for protecting some of the country’s most delicate secrets, the New York Times needs the reader to believe several incredible things:

President Trump, the Justice Department, and “right-wing” commentators are the true villains for targeting Watkins;
The affair between James Wolfe, the head of security for the Senate Intelligence Committee and a married man 32 years her senior, and Watkins is just an example of how “complicated” relationships can be in Washington, D.C.;
Watkins’s ties to a powerful man with inside information about people related to the Trump-Russia probe had nothing to do with her being hired by top news organizations, even though she casually shared that information during job interviews;
Despite repeatedly citing unnamed “intelligence officials” in many of her articles, Watkins did not use her lover as a source;
Watkins has been on a two-week “pre-planned” vacation since her ex-boyfriend was arrested on June 7 and charged with lying to the FBI about his relationship with her. (She has worked for the Times for six months.);
Watkins—not people like Carter Page, who she smeared in her reporting thanks to classified gossip from her Scoop Daddy—is the real victim because the feds seized her email and phone records.

Got all that?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/the_sad_state_of_journalism_in_the_era_of_trump_derangement_syndrome.html

Worst of all: this is from Politico, not the Onion, as Mike@Doranimated tweeted. One or more editors of a publication that aspires to be the insider’s guide to Washington, DC, read an approved for publication a story knocking Trump advisor Stephen Miller for his behavior in third grade.

Let that sink in a minute, and never forget it when you look at anything published by Politico.

http://politicalmavens.com/

On Thursday, June 21, the Times offered a front page article entitled “Incivility Infests Life in the U.S. on Trump’s Cue” , along with a heads-up about “The Art of Hooking Up” that appears on the front page of its Arts section. That review is of an installation at the Venice Architecture Biennale devoted to the “places and practices of casual sex,” specifically gay hookups with “colorful condoms and other sexual accoutrements” scattered on the floor of the pavilion. Although there are 71 participants in this biennale, in keeping with the Times’ devotion to promoting all things gay, this is the one it chose to highlight. More items deemed newsworthy on that day included violence in Nicaragua, the Taliban killing of 30 in Afghanistan and the omission of “horrific details” from the UN report on Syrian chemical attacks.

Missing from the news altogether was the fact that on June 20th, Hamas fired 45 rockets into Israel, aimed at heavily populated areas near the border, one landing near a kindergarten. This omission is particularly notable since the Times handled Hamas’ storming Israel’s border fence with burning tires and explosive kites with daily front page coverage featuring gruesome pictures of Gazan fatalities and wounded “civilians.” It called this military attack a “protest” and labeled Israel’s retaliatory measures as disproportionate, barely mentioning that the majority of Gaza’s “civilian” activity was performed by Hamas terrorists continuing their calculated use of women and children in lethal activity to arouse international sympathy. As the Arabs have repeatedly stressed, their love of martyrdom and death give them a decided edge over Israeli values of choosing and preserving life.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/19/the-press-will-stop-at-nothing

When reporters work too hard to earn a Pulitzer Prize for orchestrating the political assassination of one of the president’s most effective cabinet members, sometimes, in their zeal, they can make a big mistake.

That is exactly what happened over the weekend when the New York Times was forced to post a lengthy correction to its latest hit piece on Scott Pruitt, President Trump’s EPA administrator. While the correction itself reveals a major blunder, it obfuscates the real outrage about the original story: The reporters went after Pruitt’s daughter.

The June 15 front-page article documented a laundry list of imaginary crimes at the EPA, such as staffers trying to score coveted sports tickets for the boss and arranging his meetings with former donors or industry pals—otherwise known as standard operating procedure in D.C. and every political power center in the nation. The Times reporters raged that Pruitt “had no hesitation in leveraging his stature as a cabinet member to solicit favors himself.” Last July, Pruitt allegedly asked an aide to negotiate “access” for him to attend the Washington Nationals’ batting practice. Oh, the horror! The piece was another installment in the paper’s relentless campaign against Pruitt, a top-tier target of the anti-Trump mob.

But in their eagerness to inflict another bruise on the much-abused EPA administrator, they hit his daughter, McKenna, a graduate student at the University of Virginia.

The Times accused Pruitt of using his post at the top of the EPA to obtain a letter of recommendation from a former Virginia lawmaker to help his daughter get into the prestigious UVA law school. To support its claim, the paper reported that the lawmaker even appeared on Pruitt’s official EPA calendar.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/14/our-imploding

Patrick Maines recently retired as president of the Media Institute, a nonprofit think tank promoting a strong First Amendment, sound communications policies, and journalistic excellence

If democracy in the United States is imperiled, as some say it is, then the pregnant question remains: Imperiled by whom? For the Left, Democrats, the pop culture industry, most of the mainstream press, and those in the permanent government bureaucracy known colloquially as “the deep state,” the answer is always Donald Trump. Trump because he is a president unschooled in the manners and mores of the country’s so-called elites.

For most everybody else, the answer may be found in the reflection of those same people and institutions whose over-the-top antics are a consequence of their hatred of Trump. They marinate in a vat of hypocrisy and self-promotion, and soothe themselves with the belief that the ends (removing Trump) justify their means.

Consider, for instance, the quality of political news coverage from outlets like CNN, NBC, and its offspring, MSNBC. No matter when you tune in, you can count on tendentious and nonstop anti-Trump commentary offered in a manner that perfectly blends hubris with hysteria.

But where is the historical perspective? Where is the gravity one would expect from people who work in the only industry protected by name in the constitution? If, in fact, the media are essential to our democracy, is it too much to expect from them the modest acknowledgment that nothing is more central to a democracy than elections, even those that are won by people one dislikes?

A Shameful Surrender

https://www.wsj.com/articles/don-and-the-dictator-1528831761

President Donald Trump seems to have given North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un a media coup and not received much in return—at least not yet. The joint statement signed by the U.S. President and North Korea’s leading thug says that the two countries will seek a lasting peace and the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. Mr. Trump says he received further disarmament promises beyond the written ones and the world will eventually find out if Mr. Kim fulfills them. In short, the Trump-Kim deal is precisely the kind of vague and well-meaning gesture in foreign affairs that the political left in the U.S. should love.

Tradition holds that such agreements are met with at least respectful coverage in the American media. For example, early in President Bill Clinton’s term the U.S. reached a similar agreement with North Korea’s communist dictatorship.

Twenty-five years ago today, the New York Times published an editorial called, “To Assure a Nuclear-Free Korea.” Given that Mr. Trump was in Singapore this week trying to persuade North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons program, it’s fair to say that the hopes invested by Times folk in the Clinton deal were not exactly realized. But back in 1993, the newspaper’s editorial board expressed admiration for officials in both the American and North Korean governments :

Deft diplomacy by the Clinton Administration has coaxed North Korea back from the brink. The North had threatened to bolt from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and build nuclear arms. It will now allow routine international inspections of its nuclear sites.

Gaining access to its nuclear waste sites will require further negotiation; that could provide more evidence of how much plutonium North Korea might already have produced. But the resumption of routine inspections is a critical first step toward assuring that the Korean Peninsula is truly nuclear-free.

The agreement is a tribute to sensible officials in Pyongyang who chose the path to prosperity over the road to ruin. It’s also a tribute to cool heads in Washington who refused to overreact to North Korea’s bizarre bargaining behavior.

Along with the tip of the cap to the “sensible officials in Pyongyang,” the Times went on to describe U.S. military exercises with our friends in democratic South Korea as “needlessly provocative.” Of course time would reveal that Washington’s cool heads had wildly underreacted. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270364/paul-krugmans-intellectual-dishonesty-mark-tapson

The discourse of today’s political left is invariably marked by jaw-dropping degrees of hypocrisy and psychological projection. Case in point: last week columnist Paul Krugman posted an opinion piece at The New York Times titled “Intellectuals, Politics and Bad Faith,” in which he strove to smear the political right as intellectually dishonest – exactly the same sin of which Krugman was guilty in his own column.

Nobel Prize-winner Krugman long ago ceased being reliable as an economist but has maintained his political stature among the left as a race-obsessed smear merchant who habitually demonizes conservatives in his Times columns. As noted in his profile at DiscoverTheNetworks.org, the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s encyclopedia of the political left, Krugman’s “view of Republicans and conservatives as hate mongers has been on display again and again.” As an example, when Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and six others were shot in Tucson, Arizona in 2011 by an obsessed lunatic, Krugman falsely blamed it on “the rising tide of violence” in America stemming from “toxic,” “eliminationist” rhetoric “coming, overwhelmingly, from the right.”

In another instance, on Election Day in 2016, a bitter Krugman lashed out by attacking Donald Trump’s supporters as racist misogynists “who don’t share at all our idea of what America is about.” At least he got that last part right – Trump supporters most assuredly do not share Krugman’s Progressive vision of what America should be about.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/james-wolfe-leak-investigation-journalists-double-standard/

It is an interesting contrast.

The media are in a lather over the Justice Department’s grand-jury investigation of contacts between several reporters and a government source — the former Senate Intelligence Committee security director who has been indicted for lying to investigators about his leaks to the press.

The same media are in a lather over the refusal of the president of the United States, at least thus far, to submit to questioning by the special counsel in the Russia investigation. The president is placing himself “above the law,” they contend, if he rebuffs prosecutors or defies a grand-jury subpoena.

Whether we’re talking about journalists or presidents, the situation is the same: An investigative demand is made on people whose jobs are so important to the functioning of our self-governing republic that they are given some protection, but not absolute immunity, from the obligation to provide evidence to the grand jury.

And whether it’s a reporter or the chief executive, the question is: Under what circumstances should they be forced to testify?

The oddity — a very human oddity — is that the press is extraordinarily attuned to its own need for protection but scoffs at the notion that someone with greater responsibilities should have comparable protections.

James A. Wolfe, who was indicted on Thursday, is a textbook swamp creature. According to the New York Times, he is a former army intelligence analyst who 30 years ago latched on to the Senate Intelligence Committee as a staffer. A non-partisan staffer, of course. The Senate Intelligence Committee, a pillar of the Beltway establishment, is nothing if not self-congratulatory about its cross-the-aisle comity. It doesn’t do much, but rest assured that what little it does is awesomely bipartisan . . . except to the extent it is admirably non-partisan.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/the_new_york_times_then_the_new_york_times_now.html

The current indictment of James A. Wolfe, 58, Security Director for the Senate Subcommittee on Intelligence for 29 years, for passing classified information to reporters raises an interesting contrast of editorial standards under different editors at theTimes over the years.

In his interrogation, Wolfe admitted having a personal relationship with reporter Ali Watkins for three years while she was 30 years his junior. Watkins had zoomed from college through other news organizations in just four years to becoming National Security Correspondent for The New York Times, attended by her extraordinary access to insider information in the Federal government. In its investigation, the Department of Justice examined “tens of thousands” of email correspondence and phone records between Wolfe and Watkins, according to the Wolfe indictment.

“She [Ali Watkins] is having her private records scrutinized and spied on by the government for doing her job as a journalist, and the Justice Department’s move should be loudly condemned by everyone no matter your political preference,” The Freedom of the Press Foundation said.

According to a New York Times spokeswoman: “Freedom of the press is a cornerstone of democracy, and communications between journalists and their sources demand protection. ” She added: “Ms. Watkins said she told editors at BuzzFeed News and Politico about it and continued to cover national security, including the committee’s work.” And the New York Times had also been informed about Ms Watkin’s three-year-long personal relationship with Wolfe.